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"All right," she said.

"All right what."

"All right, I have enough to put it to her."

Avery looked at her. "Be careful."

"I always am."

"Be more careful than usual."

"Noted."

"And Leo."

"Yes."

"If she lies to you, do not do anything stupid."

"I am not going to do anything stupid."

"I have seen you with principals who lied to you."

"I am not going to do anything stupid."

Avery did not push. She closed the photograph. She left the org chart up. Leo stood.

"I will be back tonight."

"Copy."

"Get some sleep."

"I will sleep when you sleep."

"I am going to sleep."

"When, exactly, Leandra?”

"Shut up."

Avery's dry small smile did not move.

On the drive back to the rue de Chaillot Leo did two things. She told her driver to take the long way along the river, which gave her an extra seven minutes. And she thought about what she had seen in the four days she had been inside this woman's house.

She had watched Vivienne Strauss walk through her own building like a woman stepping across a narrow bridge. She had watched her say good morning to her own staff at a distance precisely calibrated to be cordial and not intimate. She had watched her take a call from a sister in Vienna and say four sentences and end the call and go back to work as if the call had been about tax. She had watched her read a financial statement at midnight at her own kitchen table with one hand on her own forehead, in a position Leo guessed she would not have held for three seconds if she had known she was being observed. Leo had looked away when it became clear Vivienne had not known.

Vivienne had a house full of people. She was alone in it.

Leo had watched her, at the dinner with Isabella Devereaux on Wednesday night, laugh twice. Leo did not forget laughs she had heard only twice. Leo did not, as a rule, register laughs at all in clients, because clients did not, as a rule, laugh around her. On Wednesday night Vivienne had laughed once early in the dinner, for Isabella, and once late, for a reason Leo had not caught; and in the car on the way back to the residence Vivienne had sat in the rear seat behind Leo for thirty-five minutes and had said one sentence, which had not been about the laugh, and Leo had watched the line of her own shoulder in the side-view mirror and had felt, not for the first time that week, that she was being looked at.

That was the kind of thing one noted and did not act on, and Leo had noted it and was not going to act on it. She was also not going to pretend she had not noted it.

Leo had been looked at by plenty of women before. But, it was going to be inconvenient with this one. She also understood, in a way that made the middle of her chest contract briefly, that the woman in the house she was currently driving back to had not been emotionally reached by anyone in a very long time, and that the person in that photograph on Avery's screen, the one who had looked at a laughing Vivienne with the expression Leo did not want to name, had probably been the last one.

Twenty-five years, Leo thought.

A long time to carry a grudge. A long time, also, to carry the other thing.